You lost the battle before it even began.
Once, long ago, you ran by the fields and in the woods, feasting on prey, learning cunning from birds and caution from deer. You lived year after year, surviving what killed your kits and the kits of your kits, until neither frost nor hunger nor disease could touch you. You feared humans still, their arrows and their traps, but you knew how to trick them. You knew how to cajole. You knew how to divert attention. You knew how to disappear.
Once, not quite so long ago — it feels like an eternity all the same — you flew above lakes and slept upon mountaintops. You feared neither humans nor spirits, secure in your prowess. You sought further cunning and wisdom, you connived, you waged wars. You gained one tail after another and defeated all those who came to challenge you until you stood alone at the apex. You were supreme.
That is, until she arrived.
You laughed at her when she first appeared before you, walking into the circle of your followers in her polished shoes and her layered dress and a daub of blood on cheek, either indifferent or ignorant of the two hundred pairs of yellow eyes fixed upon her. So soft and human-like and weak. You knew she was concealing some of her power, perhaps even the majority of it, but the impression of easy prey remained. She could be torn to pieces exactly like a human, her innards split, her still-warm heart and liver devoured without a second thought.
Who was she to dare challenge you? You had lived for a thousand years. You were a ruler of rulers, the one every single fox in the land paid homage to. You knew all the tricks, held all the power, were respected even by those who despised you. And so you laughed and laughed and bid her to do her worst. You gave her a clean shot at you, confident she could not touch you either through strength or artifice.
By the time you discovered just how much she was holding back, just what she was planning, just what she had already pressed into her service, it was far too late. You were already overcome, compressed, strangled, smothered, gone.
By all accounts, you should no longer exist.
It happens intermittently: you re-emerge above the surface, with no indication of what propelled you from the dark depths in which you slumber. For whatever reason, you live for a few minutes more before drowning again. Being back gives you no purchase: you are a shadow, the thinnest of spectres. A thing that should not be. Somehow, you have tricked death once more without even meaning to.
You do what little you can. You observe your surroundings and try to estimate how many years have passed. You can sometimes feel reverberations of the new master of your body moving your former limbs, but for the most part the world spins and slides before your eyes with no tactile sensations.
There is precious little room for despair. Or anything, for that matter. You merely watch, appreciating the sights and the faintest hints of scents, curious to see if anyone is nearby and whether you recognise them.
More often than not, you see her. Standing placidly in swirling chaos. Asleep, with her long hair draped across her bare arms. In quiet contemplation on a mountainside. Smiling. Thoughtful. Blank. Meeting your eyes without seeing you, observing only the invader as she gives it her orders.
Perhaps it's the nature of such snapshots that makes any contrast between past and present so obvious. Or perhaps it's clear to all who see her what is happening to this indirect mistress of yours.
She is growing weak.
You could never guess how or why. You cannot even know if her infirmity is temporary or the kind of gnawing thing that will claw at her until nothing is left but bone. You do not even have time to ponder the possibilities: you are already sinking again.
As the black waters close in over your head once more, you have time for one final lingering thought.
When the moon of her power wanes completely, someone will feast. And if you can at all help it, that someone will be using your teeth.